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The day was November 29th and the year was 1970.
“This way girls!” yelled the hiker who had brought them all there to bond.
“DAD!” shrieked the youngest as she drew her hand away from the atrocious lump that she had stumbled upon in her attempt to capture the moment for her insta-story.
Evidently the girl had good reason to be afraid.
What she had discovered was not only a corpse but actually one of the most enigmatic ones to be found thus far.
The horror oozed steadily out from where her hand had been only a moment ago, seeping black venom into the circumfrencial shrubbery.
The horror took the shape of a face. It sort of resembled the Darth Vader who had recently emerged from the burning pit in that legendary film.
All three (the father and the two daughters) had by now nearly forgotten that they were currently located in a forest in Bergen in Norway. It could not be denied that they imagined themselves to have been transported into some sort of pseudo-hell where only their worst fears could be made a reality.
The biggest disgrace planted onto the body was by far the face: the precious features of this had been twisted with near mechanical precision far beyond the point of identity-based intelligibility.
The disorienting fact remained that the lady had not seemed as innocent and powerless as she had now become upon her death while in the midst of her lively youth. Not at all actually. Most people even said she looked much too dark and brooding to be taken seriously as a feminine female. While the now-corpse had belonged to the realm of the living, the only redeeming feature among her extreme angularity had been the rounded softness of her wonderful charm.
“Ladies, it’s time for a lesson on how to locate a set of local authorities,” exclaimed the father.
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Initially, the clean-up crew that had been sent on this case thought that the dead lady had been plagued by carbon monoxide poisoning. There was some conflict about this however, because there were also some (unidentified) prescription drugs scattered around her half-rotten body.
The third confusing clue was her jewellery. Some bedazzled beads had been placed in such a configuration that one could have made the case for the Isdal Woman having undergone some sort of ritual death.
It took the clean-up crew a while to think about which clue should be used as the headline for publication of their findings on the local media. Of course they could not lie and were forced to mention all three attributes, but chose in the end to focus decidedly on the third (the strange jewellery) as the notion of the appearance of some sort of mysterious cult was deemed to be the most striking and attention-grabbing headline from the set of options.
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It was thus that the inquiry into the identity of the corpse, made known as the Isdal woman, was begun.
Upon embarking on this exploration, one of the first things found was that her fingerprints had been discovered upon two suitcases stored for later collection at Bergen station.
These fingerprints then, facilitated another, arguably increasingly important discovery. It appeared that the identity matching the fingerprints was associated with an infamous international woman of mystery, who was infamous for existing under eight different official identities.
Or it was apparently known to be a fact that she had eight, but the clean-up crew refused to identify them so the exact nature of these remains unclear to us laypeople.
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Ok, I went back to check from more reputable sources, and it seems that they also support the idea of there being eight.
One of the guys I asked about it was even brave enough to state this as one of the few facts to have thus far have been officially resolved about this operation.
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So if the Isdal Woman had, during her time alive, been a badass spy lady with eight different identities, how had she ended up dead in a forest in Bergen?
The real reason, that the investigators were never to officially discover, was a man spy she was never meant to meet.
It just so happened that the Isdal Woman and Spy Man had first encountered one another at the bottom of the steps at an undercover speak easy.
It is probably needless to say that even before their meeting, the night had been off to an auspicious start.
Actually, it had begun with the Isdal Woman calling up a couple of her friends who were also part of the same secret service as she and asking these companions whether any of them would like to accompany her for some drinks out on the town.
There had been “no”’s across the board in response, after which the Isdal Woman had nevertheless considered it favourable to go.
“It be like that sometimes,” she had thought, drinking a badly mixed Negroni (why a Negroni, we don’t know, as it was commonly known that the Isdal Woman despised this genre of cocktails above all other) and wearing a silky night dress that she had bought to wear around her boyfriend, who had at that time only existed in the future tense.
She had worn something more boyish to go out, as she had not wanted, in any circumstances, for her perverse femininity to be exposed for all to see.
It seemed almost like fate then, that when the Isdal Woman had arrived at the bar, she had been semi-coerced into drink another Negroni. This had been because she had been told by the barman that it had been the drink of the week. Our main lady secretly suspected the fact that the Negroni also happened to be the most expensive drink on the menu probably to have something to do with the fact that this had been the end-point of the punchline of the bar-tender, but she had paid no mind to this potential hinderance and decided to get it anyways.The main reason she had given in, however, had been because the bartender in question happened to have a strange variety of patchy facial hair that the Isdal woman knew sometimes to be common to men hailing from the Northern regions of the globe and that happened to be eerily reminiscent of her paternal lineage.
I guess it would seem quite ironic then, that it was the Negroni that had ended up drawing the Spy Man to the Isdal Woman.
“Oh, I consider myself quite a Negroni lover myself,” the Spy Man had said in an emphasised baritone, shimmying slightly closer to the Isdal Woman. The leather disks underneath their sitting bones had been nearly displaced as he had brought his arm to contact with her left-most one in an unusual, but not completely uncomfortable way.
The Isdal Woman had been keen to reply, but had had the issue of not having had much to say in relation to her excursion of fakery. She had sincerely grown attached to the Spy Man’s disturbed demeanour, and had under no circumstances wanted to hurt his feelings.
As a result she had just ended up giving him one of those ‘giggle-glances’, which had thankfully been enough to alter the conversational proceedings enough for the two to make their way to the leather seating arrangement placed so conveniently in their vicinity.
A couple (a total of five) of Negronis later, it had dawned upon the Isdal Woman that she and the Spy Man were in fact colleagues, secretly working in league with one another and supporting the same line of work.
What would have dawned on her even sooner than the previous fact, if only she would have been more sober at the time, was that she and this new beau possessed strikingly similar past histories.
From schooling, to hobbies, to even siblings, the only notable difference between their years passed seemed to have been that instead of the eight identities that the Isdal Woman had been able to master, her male counterpart had only been able to juggle four (and the Isdal Woman secretly thought this to be an exaggeration and estimated the reality to be more along the lines of two or three).
After that fifth Negroni, they had spoken deep into the night about their worked based selves, observing as their voices floated quietly into the cracks of the wooden ceiling, juxtaposing with the unsteady precipices of the wispy ends of smoke rubbing off the butts of their slim cigarettes.
Forthwith, it had been clear to the Isdal Woman that the two had been too compatible for their own good. It seemed without a doubt that they had been constructed in complementary sections of birthing juices of the Interplanetary Matrix Grid System.
Or that is at least how she had felt.
Of him we are not sure.
They spoke some more and had later been spotted trudging out of the bar holding hands. Barman patchy beard had been left alone in his spot, eyeing them with a wistful and jealous energy.
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This could have been the end, but that was not the case at all.
No, at the start I already revealed how the Isdal Woman had found her end in a forest in Bergen in the most unsuitable circumstances. So of course there must have been something else that happened after that.
It happened on their honeymoon.
The Isdal Woman and the Spy Man had been sat at the most sumptuously sublime beach, enjoying each other in the oppressive heat.
It could be said in the corniest sense of the phrase that they had been young and in love.
Unfortunately the Isdal Woman had had more on her mind.
Instead of living for the moment as she should have been, there had been a dark cloud looming over her disheveled do.
The text painted onto the dark cloud was this:
THIS IS NOT AT ALL WHAT YOU HAD PLANNED FOR THIS PERIOD OF EXISTENCE
While wistful, it was true. For this was nothing but a sidetrack off her predestined path.
The crushing weight of failure had demolished the independent portion of her soul with an unhinging force.
What a waste.
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In the end, the Isdal Woman had not wanted the man to know she had been driven to the edge of insanity for his sake.
In fact, she had not wanted anyone to understand how incredibly affected she had been by the whole thing.
Hence the traps.
The prescription drugs, the jewelry, the suitcase with her fingerprints at Bergen Station.
But I am the only one who knows, the only one she left a note for.
The note is quite personal, and I assure you that most of it is too depressing to understand anyways. Too depressing for one to even want to understand really.
Perhaps the most striking I have found to be her eternalization of the moment preluding death.
“I am not sure whether this is entirely true, but I feel this to be by far the finest medley of lemon and saffron I have yet to witness,” she had written.
The moment which she had attempted unsuccessfully to described was one in which she had turned her gaze out of the window and into the park that she had never before noticed due to the rainy weather. She had turned her irises to face the golden shadows of blissful alleviation, into the chasms of leaves betwixt which she could have imagined her future children to play.
“What a lame and stereotypical thought.”
Was the note that had ended the note.
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As the narrator, I want nothing more than to release a sigh.
Perhaps the biggest shame of all is that the Norwegian police have decided to reopen the case.
I believe it must be because the investigators admit some sort of personal connection.
After all, for what other reason would the Haukeland Hospital still house the remnants of the Isdal Woman’s jaw and internal organs?
Little do the investigators know though, that they will never figure out this story even if they find her relatives on the basis of some or other teeth based or DNA related comparisons.
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WAST WRTNG 